Houdini

The playhouse was luxurious, as far as playhouses go. It was insulated, wired for electricity, contained an antique stove that young me half-suspected was hooked up and functional (it wasn't), a rack of old Owl magazines, a few pieces of castoff furniture. The thick wooden door had a small hook on the inside to keep the building shut against inclement weather while in use, and the outside latch couldn't be accessed from inside. For many years, one of the panes in the kitchen window was missing, leaving an opening the size of a sheet of paper.

Close to the backside of the building was a high wooden corral fence. If you climbed the fence, careful to avoid splinters, you could step onto one of the posts, tall and broad, and leap onto the playhouse roof. Up on the shingles under the full sun, I set trays of mud to dry into cakes, which I then stored in the little kitchen inside. Who knows why.

Sometimes cats would hide their clutches of kittens inside and pass through the missing window at will. Or, the kittens would grow up in the space beneath the building between the skids, gamboling in the warm grass in front of the door and retreating underneath at anyone's approach.

Over time, the wooden walls weathered, and one of the slats fell off entirely after I picked out the underlining with some irrational faith that it would grow back. A hive of bees took over the hollow wall using the opening I had so obligingly created, and for many years using the playhouse in the summer meant edging cautiously through the door trying to leave the bees unprovoked. The little building has now been tinned over and its interior painted, little resembling the image in my memories.

One summer day, many of my relatives were visiting the farm for some celebration or other. Several of my siblings and I, and perhaps a couple cousins, were gathered in the playhouse at some point. One of the cousins—the same age as my sister and about five years older than me—got upset about something; I didn't know what at the time, and still don't. To our horror, he closed the heavy door and locked us inside, walking off in a huff.

No matter how long you might elect to stay in a confined space, the very instant you're robbed of choice the situation becomes immediately unbearable. Suddenly you're suffocating, your muscles are cramping, the very air is oppressive and you notice you're dehydrated to the brink of death.

The obvious tactic was to shout for help, but nobody was in earshot (except our jailor, rapidly dwindling into the distance). Being the youngest and smallest of the bunch, I was tasked with escaping through the only available route. I'm not sure how old I was at the time, but I was young enough to squirm through the empty windowpane on that occasion. Using my beanpole physique to great advantage, I slithered headfirst through the paper-sized opening, squeezing my shoulders through and stretching my hands toward the ground to break my fall, my siblings helping to maneuver me from inside. Kicking my feet free at last, I ran to unbolt the door.

I remember little from that incident; but the images of the closed door, the uncertainty of my siblings, the back of our cousin as he walked away, and the scrape of the window's pastel-blue edge as I wrenched myself through—these are perfect images in my inner photo album.

Farm Ninja

When I was very young, it was much less common to see an airplane flying overhead than it became in my teenage years. In the quiet of my parents' farm, you could hear the jet engines even though they were impossibly far away, and you could follow the gentle white contrails all the way across the wide prairie sky. On a lazy summer day with a clear blue sky, it could almost be peaceful.

Unless your older brother told you they were bomber planes.

I remember us running with our heads hunched down and our hearts thumping, hoping to reach the safety of the shop before we were spotted and the bombs let loose. Maybe it was a crop duster, which would understandably be more alarming than a high-flying jet. It was the late 1980s; who knows what bits of media had rearranged themselves in my brother's young mind to manufacture the idea. In any case, the sound of a jet engine would thereafter grip me with the terrified need to hide, and I would run for the nearest roof—the house, a barn, a shed, even tucked under the hopper of a granary. Years later, when the first helicopter that I encountered "in the wild" hovered overhead dropping off bundles of oil-surveying equipment, I watched from a hidden vantage point and only scurried away when the helicopter was facing away from me.

At some point, somebody must have set me straight about airplanes, though I can't remember when or who. The impulse to hide from outsiders, though, had been instilled deep, and went far beyond aircraft. At any sign of an approaching vehicle—which were not frequent, as our kilometer-long lane was a dead end that only visitors, the schoolbus, and disoriented travelers would drive down—we children would tuck ourselves into one of myriad hiding spots and stay out of sight until the coast was clear. I'm not sure what the motivation was; it seemed to be a mixture of uncertainty, unwillingness to be involved in conversation, a sense of safety that came from seclusion, and the reinforcement that comes with years of habit.

I learned to be as invisible as possible, to see without being seen, to listen without sharing my own inner dialogue.

After-School Loitering

The farm kids always stayed an extra half hour in the schoolyard each day, waiting for buses to arrive from the highschool in the neighbouring town. At the same time, buses would depart westward filled with elementary school kids to complete the process in the opposite direction. When they arrived, the buses unloaded their town kids and picked up the farm kids on their way to the country.

The space in front of the school was not where students (except Kindergarteners) spent recess, but we farm kids waited for the buses there every day. We were required to stay on the sidewalk until the first buses had left and the presiding teacher gave the signal for us to swarm into the playground.

In the winter, the lawn on one side of the walkway would be turned into a snowscape. Once enough snow had accumulated, a giant hill would be pushed up in the centre of the lawn by a tractor. Over the course of the winter, we would transform the little hill with tunnels and slides.

In the spring when the snow had melted and we put away our winter boots, long skipping ropes would be dug from the depths of the gym's equipment room. Feeling light in our fair-weather shoes, we would line up on the walkway that led to the road—around eight children, however many could squeeze in—and jump, jump, jump, jump on and on while two unlucky kids swung the rope at either end of the line.

The other side of the walkway was dominated by a playground apparatus that can only be described as "old-school." It was a large installation made of green, treated wood that would give you splinters if you weren't careful. One of the slides was gleaming metal that became scalding on sunny days; the other was a steep segmented tube that you were sure to either bash your face on, or catch your pants on one of the bolts connecting the segments. There was a fire pole that would burn the skin off your palms as you slid down. There was a tire swing suspended by three plastic-covered chains that held three children sitting in a circle, as likely as not being given a "spinner" push by a fourth child. There were monkey bars a little too high off the ground and a little too far apart to be used by anyone smaller than a grade fiver.

Beside the main structure was a swingset, which was where everybody wanted to wait when the weather was fine. There were only eight or ten swings, and kids would line up on the sidewalk as if they were at a trackmeet, waiting for the teacher's signal like a gunshot starting a race. The bigger you were, the likelier it was you'd reach the swingset first; so, the swings were typically dominated by the grade fives. Grade sixes seemed to prefer lounging against the building where they would chat or read.

One day when I was in grade four or five, I sat on the concrete in front of the school, shaded by a section of roof that jutted out from the building. I felt unhappy in an apathetic sort of way—something I had felt once in a while, but didn't know why. I sat there staring at nothing in particular and probably wearing my angry/unfriendly/melancholy expression (aka my resting face), when a girl in my grade strolled by. She stopped in front of me and studied at me for a moment.

"Stressed?" she asked.

"Depressed," I replied.

She nodded and continued on. I'm not sure I knew the difference between the two, at the time. I doubt I really knew what being depressed meant, for that matter. Despite my nostalgia and the simplicity of childhood, however, I do remember very well that life began to shape me into a melancholy creature, even at that early age.